Football is one of the most violent sports in the world. From a young age, boys who engage in the sport are taught to hit hard and always get back up. At some point, they’re told to “stop crying” when they feel hurt or “stop hitting like a girl” when they’re not aggressive enough. This is supposed to motivate the players to do better in the sport.
Instead, this can unconsciously teach the child that anything feminine isn’t what you should be, and that to be a real man you shouldn’t have feminine traits. They can understand masculinity through the lens of their coaches, who are seen as role models. When one of the child’s main models, and teachers of masculinity, show them that to be a man you must not have what those coaches may call feminine traits, and “tough it out,” the child will take the coach’s ideas as truth. They might teach that feminine traits are being over-emotional. It’s an idea that to be a man you must be in opposition to femininity. The child then grows up and goes into the world, or possibly the National Football League (NFL), with sexist ideas. The impact of masculinity on NFL players manifests in different ways, influencing their behavior, performance, and well-being both on the field and off.
Masculinity is learned in the early stages of a boy’s life. According to researchers at the Annual Review of Psychology, children usually understand gender roles by age 2 or 3, favoring activities that they perceive match their gender. This early exposure shapes their views on what is socially acceptable, impacting their future behaviors.
One way men are conditioned to view gender on football fields is by seeing a “team mom,” who is often by default expected to nurture players, handout snacks, and cheer them on from the sidelines.
Additionally, being called gay is an insult when players are “trash talking,” or a phrase like “you hit like a girl,” reinforces stereotypes and messages the child has received. These attitudes in youth football reinforce harmful biases as the kids get older.
Pressure to be a false form of masculinity — that says you can’t have emotions or weakness — leads people to bury their vulnerabilities. This is seen in the case of Julian Edelman and Danny Amendola, former Patriots receivers who endured many concussions, due to their not wanting to show weakness. On the Games with Names podcast, they both made a pact to each other that if they were struck and unable to get up quickly, they’d pick each other up to avoid concussion protocol. They say they got several concussions but they never gave the medical staff a chance to help them.
On The Colin Cowherd Podcast, Joe Burrow, the current All-Pro quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals, says “All players play through injuries and concussions.” He also stated that he has done this so many times that he doesn’t remember the end of some games. Burrow played through an ankle injury in the 2023 season and reinjured it.
Glorifying toughness in men leads to their health being compromised. The expectation to “stop crying,” or to “tough it out,” can result in destructive outbursts of violence or manifest in destructive behaviors, like in the case of Ray Rice & Ray Lewis.
Rice and Lewis’s bottled-up aggression translated into physicality off the football field. Rice hit his then-fiancée, and Lewis was allegedly involved in an altercation that ended the lives of two men. These examples show how far men will go to protect their masculinity, even if it destroys others, or themselves, in the process. The fear of being perceived as weak or vulnerable, with no outlet for emotional expression, can lead to a toxic environment that endangers people’s health, but also continues a cycle of emotional neglect.
Because there is often no room in football for anything that’s not hyper-masculine, when someone like Carl Nassib comes out as gay, there will be a lot of controversy. A reason this caused so much controversy is that sexuality is one way some people diminish someone’s masculinity, since many regard heterosexual men as more masculine than homosexual men. But Nassib also had a plethora of support.
There isn’t just one way to be a man. You can be a real man, and also be gay. One reason many men came out in support of Nassib, and even came out as gay because of him, could be because of this pressure to conform to traditional masculine norms.
This is toxic masculinity. This toxicity is harmful because it keeps men restricted to oversimplified ideas of manhood, and disregarding anything outside of that.
The physicality of football can cause young men to shield their emotions. As they grow up, men then bury their emotions until it becomes too much to bear and this internal rage manifests itself. We as men must learn to show that masculinity can be inclusive and break the cycle of old stereotypes.
